Using Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow to Find Online PR Opportunities

Majestic’s new Topical Trust Flow promises full web categorization. The feature has lots of potential: this article shows how it can be used to quickly identify multiple competitor news stories – stories that can lead to PR opportunities for your clients.

In April this year, Majestic released a new feature Topical Trust Flow, which promised “full web categorization.”

Majestic’s Dixon Jones said at the time, that the new Topical Trust Flow would be a huge leap forward not only for SEOs but for “inbound and outreach marketers, advertising strategists, PR professionals and business analysts.” It’s also a huge help for SEOs who want to work with all of the above.

Topical Trust Flow is a work in progress that looks to have exciting possibilities. Using a patent pending algorithm, Majestic have “categorized the whole web- not just by website, but every page and sub-domain as well”.

The potential seems enormous. Here’s an outline for a simple method for identifying PR opportunities.

PR Superstars

Every market has its public relations superstars – companies both large and small who have learned how to work the media to get coverage for their products.

Because they’ve been actively seeking media exposure, and been successful, analyzing the links to such companies can quickly find a large number of media opportunities.

In the travel industry, Airbnb.com is one such superstar – due to the disruptive nature of their business model and a sound PR strategy. Analyzing the site, particularly using ‘topical trust flow’ can uncover promising media opportunities.

Start with Majestic’s site explorer and enter the root domain to maximize the number of results.

Majestic gives trust flow and citation flow scores for the domain and now adds categorization of the sites that link to Airbnb.com.

This is a logarithmic score that lists the categories or ‘topics’ in descending order:

This gives a nice graphic snapshot and to see in more detail, click on the Topics tab in the menu – the results appear in a table like this:

There is much to explore here, but we’ve highlighted ‘News / Newspapers’ at position 7 in the table. You can then click on ‘External backlinks’ and the table will expand to show the top 10 ‘News / Newspapers’ links:

The table shows the source link (the ‘news/newspaper site’ on which it sits); the destination link (the target page on Airbnb.com) and the anchor text used.

The categorization is pretty accurate – all the results are clearly top-notch media links. As well as seeing the top 10, you can also download the top 100 links.

Following the source link can reveal a ton of information.

PR Challenges and Strategies Revealed

One of the advantages of using link analysis, as opposed to say a media database is one of context. Following the link takes you right to the story and you can learn a lot in a short period of time.

A new marketing campaign they’ve developed in response, “Belong anywhere”.

The name of the journalist who wrote the story.

That’s a lot of useful information if you were competing with Airbnb.com. And it you’re not a competitor, it can give you inspiration for your own link building.

Following all 10 of the top links provided is going to give you great insight into Airbnb.com’s relationship with the media. And it’s also going to give you targets, journalists and writers you may approach for your own sites.

Digging for More Opportunities

But that’s just with a single topic, “News / Newspapers” – Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow can give us many relevant news opportunities.

The next step is to filter topics by the word ‘News’ as in:

So by moving from a single topic ‘News / Newspapers’ to search for topics that include the word ‘News’, we uncover many more opportunities.

In this example, we discovered 24 news topics that included links to Airbnb.com.

Now, there will be some crossover among topics but this looks like a powerful method to get multiple opportunities.

Dip into another topic, for example ‘News / Current Events’ and you get another set of links to Airbnb.com:

Now another set of top 10 links appear and again you can download another top 100 links.

Summary

Using the powerful filter you can isolate the categories that you’re interested in – in this example, we’ve isolated news and PR opportunities

By exploring the source links, we’ve been able to see the news coverage in context and understand something of the strategy that generated the coverage in the first place

We’ve been able to identify specific journalists, see what type of stories they interested in and what editorial approach they’re likely to take.

Now the Hard Part

Getting news coverage is not easy. It takes in-depth research, an understanding of what makes news and a compelling pitch to targeted journalists. One of the many things Majestic have provided with Topical Trust Flow, is a powerful PR feature within a familiar tool.

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